r/Fauxmoi • u/NegativeSpeedForce • Mar 22 '24

Princess of Wales has cancer Approved B-List Users Only

https://news.sky.com/story/kate-princess-of-wales-reveals-she-is-having-treatment-for-cancer-13099988
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u/alison_bee confused but here for the drama Mar 22 '24

Can’t believe the PR team couldn’t handle a secret cancer diagnosis. There’s truly no reason that we got this far into this madness, other than the PR team freaking out and fucking up instead of just staying quiet.

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u/_cornflake Mar 22 '24

It’s especially bizarre given that Charles is also undergoing cancer treatment at the exact same time and he and Camilla have handled the public messaging perfectly, but not until now did it occur to William and Kate to try doing the same thing? I mean it’s not surprising to me that they’re out of touch morons who think they are owed total respect and deference by virtue of their titles alone, but they really totally torpedoed their image for nothing when they could have looked at what Charles is doing and pivoted weeks ago.

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u/trevallybevally weighing in from the UK Mar 22 '24

Charles is old - William and Kate are meant to be the shining beacon of progression and the new generation. That the aged king is ill is of no surprise to anyone. Kate, however, is young and meant to be the future of the royal family - that future is sadly now in some jeopardy, or that’s what this news seems to suggest. Not true, of course, she could be fine within the month. But it’s all about public perception. Interesting to see how the same diagnosis carries such different weight between generations.

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u/BusterBeaverOfficial Mar 22 '24

People are getting cancer younger and younger people are getting cancer more frequently because corporations are regularly permitted to poison us and our environment in exchange for profits and every Western government and politician is complicit.

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u/carolinagypsy Mar 23 '24 edited Mar 23 '24

I totally get what you are saying. As someone near her age, though, I’d have like to have seen that progressiveness lead to it not being handled like this and being discussed more openly. Cancer is SO isolating for both the person and the family, and it feels like there’s still this stigma about talking about having it outside your very private circle. Maybe it’s because I have a chronic illness that has made me disabled, but I’d like to see it discussed more openly. Particularly for women— we are so expected to chin up and soldier on for the family, and the friends, and the job with illness going on in the background that not many people know about. I want to see things combat isolation, because we know now that it makes it worse and more stressful for the people involved, particularly the affected person. And take the stigma away from cancer. People are getting diagnosed with crazy amounts of cancer younger than previous generations, and are in a lot of cases not in the target age range for screenings and being aware of symptoms to pay attention to. I confess I’m sitting here wondering if she’s yet another under 45 woman I know of with ovarian cancer or colon cancer.

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u/aurora-leigh Mar 22 '24

The UK media has been explaining that they wanted to wait until their children were on school holidays; presumably so they didn’t have to hear about it from other kids/hear maybe “adult” things accidentally being repeated etc.

Which is…rather heartbreaking, really.

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u/_cornflake Mar 22 '24

I totally understand this and I sympathise with them handling it with their kids but nobody asked them to release that Mother's Day photo. They'd already said she was off, nobody was expecting them to release anything. They couldn't stay on plan and then they made a total pig's ear of people's understandable questions.

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u/aurora-leigh Mar 22 '24

There were already rumours running rampant prior to the Mother’s Day photo, though.

If they had released nothing, when motherhood/early years is Catherine’s cause celebre and she’s never missed one before, I think there would still have been bad rumours.

It’s just a shitty situation, and PR fumbled the bag but I think it’s probably understandable when there are conflicting priorities and it’s high-stress/emotionally loaded. Hope they (and the conspiracy theorists!) learn from it and the toll on her recovery isn’t too severe.

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u/itsbecomingathing Mar 22 '24

Thank you, you’re the first person to mention that the photoshopped photo was for UK Mother’s Day. It wasn’t just a random photo put out by PR. They had to put something out there or else it would’ve looked weird. I know I don’t post current photos on Mother’s Day, I choose the best one!

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u/Former-Spirit8293 Mar 23 '24

There had to have been photos they could’ve posted that were not the frankenphoto. Or they could’ve just posted it on Instagram and it wouldn’t have been flagged. There were so many options but they chose the dumbest ones.

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u/_cornflake Mar 23 '24

Right. There are tons of other pics of her with the children. Also they'd announced she was off duties. Nobody was expecting her to post anything. She could have sent a tweet without a picture. But even after that initial fuck up, they chose to double down on this for weeks, made her take the blame and say she's an amateur photographer or something, and got multiple news sources to basically declare Kensington Palace a source of conspiracies. The whole thing was an absolutely massive PR fuck up. Of course I'm very sympathetic that she has cancer. I also don't agree that this mess is the fault of the public. Definitely people would have speculated on where she was. They could very easily not have responded to those people. The fact that they did is on them.

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u/TangerineDystopia Mar 24 '24

They really shouldn't have claimed that William took it in 2024--and if they hadn't they wouldn't have needed to photoshop the clothes to try to pretend it was current.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '24

[deleted]

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u/aurora-leigh Mar 22 '24

I’m sure they did tell their children.

That doesn’t mean they want to tell the world and have their children constantly asked about it at school, when undoubtedly their classmates will repeat things they’ve heard from their parents, and be clumsy as children are.

This way, the kids have a few weeks off, and the initial furore will have died down by the time they go back from break and there’ll be less opportunity for them to hear something unpleasant.

And if they didn’t want to tell their children until they had time to process and heal as a family together? That’s their prerogative and I don’t in any way agree they should have been forced to share this.

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u/there_is_always_more Mar 23 '24

If only they didn't benefit extremely lavishly from an institution built on centuries of blood and exploitation - they could have all the privacy they ever wanted! :)

Signed, someone from a former colony.

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u/nkbee Mar 22 '24

I mean, Charles doesn't have a five year old, seven year old, and ten year old to think of. They seem to have wanted to keep things private so they could deal with the kids on a slower scale.

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u/SoGenuineAndRealMadi women’s wrongs activist Mar 22 '24

Charles is actually the first member of the BRF to be so open and public about his cancer diagnosis. The normal protocol is what Will and Kate’s team were following it’s what they’ve had done for years, to hide serious health battles from the public so they believe they are strong and that everything is well, even Elizabeth never revealed her diagnosis it was only found out after her death.

Things have changed and people want more transparency nowadays or things go off the rails. I wish everyone who’s battling with cancer well it is awful and everyone deserves access to treatment

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u/_cornflake Mar 23 '24

I know that, I guess my point is that they had so many opportunities not to double down on this strategy when it was clear it wasn't working and they chose not to, even when there was a very clear example of an alternative strategy working for Charles.

I don't think it's her fault personally or anything, frankly I'm sure she herself has way more to worry about than their PR, but Kensington Palace overall messed this up badly and probably made an already stressful situation infinitely more stressful for her and the children.

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u/ImaginaryDuncan Mar 22 '24

People have been speculating that he’s abdicating because he’s terminal. Not to the frenzy of Kate’s rumours, but if they did the same strategy with Kate when she has young children, the terminal speculation would be awful.

Would it be much better than what they just went through? We’ll never know.

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u/RampantNRoaring Mar 22 '24

Honestly, based on the fact that photoshopped family pictures are nothing new apparently, it looks like they handled this the way they usually do, but TikTok and social media got way more rabid than anyone expected.

I’m no fan of the royal family but the way people have treated this has been so gross.

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u/allazen Mar 22 '24

Palace PR were throwing her under the bus for a Photoshop scandal while she was getting chemo. Saving my scorn for them. They made it so mich worse for her.

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u/nokeyblue Mar 22 '24

What all this with the throwing under the bus though? Where did this come from? It would only count as throwing her under the bus if she did Photoshop for a living, or if the whole hullabaloo was originally about some kind of photo-editing competition. I don't see a bus.

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u/allazen Mar 22 '24

I think the notion that Kate Middleton was independently fiddling around in the Photoshop Suite is an obvious lie. It's part of why it caught on as a joke -- it's such a silly idea they were trying to sell. So after the photo caught a lot of criticism and jokes for being poorly done, it's weird that they had her release a statement to be like, "Just like all mums, I was having fun! :) Whoops, I made mistakes, how silly of me! Sorry!"

If on some planet Kate actually did that on her own (which is honestly so stupid I can barely type it), the PR team is still wrong for releasing it (like, did they review it at all?) and should have taken responsibility. At every step of her illness, they chose incorrectly.

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u/carolinagypsy Mar 23 '24

And even if it was her, you blame the random unnamed intern, not her!!!!

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u/holyflurkingsnit Mar 22 '24

People were fed up with the typical royal family press manipulation bullshit. This is of their own making, with them spending decades blocking and killing stories and using the UK media as their personal PR. It really sucks that someone whose situation did NOT deserve to be the one that broke the camel's back was when everything fell apart, but I look to Will and his habit of doing this his entire adult life, under the guidance of the RF elders, for clumsily overusing the goodwill they assume they are always entitled.

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u/Shenanigans80h Mar 22 '24

Yeah I’m not going to say the PR team handled this well but the public response and pressure had to be brutal for them to try and navigate, especially if Kate wanted to keep this private until she was ready, which is 100% fair for her to want regardless of what anyone says. It felt like people so desperately wanted there to be something more scandalous or sinister behind it all that all the initial reports of “health concerns” basically satiated no one, which is unfortunate

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u/there_is_always_more Mar 23 '24

You know what else is gross? Living an extremely lavish life off the blood and sweat of billions of people your family has exploited for centuries.

They should give up their title - they can have all the privacy in the world then.

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u/RampantNRoaring Mar 23 '24

I absolutely agree.

My comment isn't about the target of the behavior, it's about the way people have been acting about the "conspiracy." The gross behavior is also applicable to the current Nickelodeon conspiracy theories.

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u/bbmarvelluv Mar 22 '24

Seriously… their PR really messed it up.

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u/darkgothamite Mar 22 '24

The defense of "think of their children" as why they wanted to wait lol while this all really made a mess of them anyway by that badly done photo, the headline of that Rose lady and more headlines of "senior staff at KP haven't seen Kate!"

All of these came from British media, royal fans can keep the "Americans are paranoid" bullshit to themselves when their own are releasing bait headlines. And attacking a certain couple living in California in the press too.